Personality Theories
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smcounselor on March 28, 2009
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108 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 4 functions of Personality Theories | To provide a way of organizing what we know about ourselves and others; To explain differences between individuals, To explore how people conduct their lives; To determine ways to help improve lives. |
| Personality Traits | General ways of behaving that characterize an individual. |
| Personality Psychologists | Try to develop systematic theories about human behavior and to test their theories in a scientific way. |
| The Four Major Schools of Personality Theory | Psychoanalytic, Behaviorists, Humanistic, Trait |
| Psychoanalytic | The Personality Theory that emphasizes the importance of motive hidden deep in the unconsciousness. |
| Founder of the Psychoanalytic School | Sigmund Freud |
| Neo-Freudians | Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Erik Erikson |
| Behaviorists | Study the way rewards and punishments shape our actions. |
| Founders of Behaviorism | John Watson, B.F. Skinner |
| Humanism | Emphasizes human potential for growth, creativity, and spontaneity. |
| Humanists | Abrahan Maslow, Carl Rogers |
| Trait Theory | Stresses the importance of understanding basic personality characteristics. |
| Trait Theorists | Gordon Allport, Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck |
| He concluded that some of the most powerful influences of human personality were things we are not conscious of | Sigmund Freud |
| Freud | Believed that unconscious feeling and experiences of childhood impact adult personality and behavior |
| Three parts of Freud's Structual Model | Id, Ego, Superego |
| Freud's Death Drive | The desire for the final end shows up in human personality as destructiveness and aggression |
| Freud's Life Instinct | Primarily erotic and pleasure seeking |
| Id | Reservoir of instinctual urges |
| Id | Lustful or drive-ridden part of the unconscious |
| Id | Seeks immediate gratification of desires regardless of consequences |
| Ego | Rational, thoughtful, realistic personality process |
| Superego | moral part of personality |
| Superego | the source of conscience and high ideals |
| Superego | source of guilt feelings |
| Id | What a person wants to do |
| Ego | What a person can do |
| Superego | What a person should do |
| Id and Superego | frequently come into conflict |
| Ego | must resolve the conflict between the Id and Superego without offending either |
| Defense Mechanisms | protect the ego from experiencing anxiety about failing in its tasks |
| Defense Mechanisms | are necessary to psychological well-being |
| Defense Mechanisms | relieve intolerable confusion |
| 5 main defense mechanisms | displacement, repression, reaction formation, projection, regression |
| Displacement | shifting an unconscious wish that causes anxiety to another object or person |
| Repression | pushing anxious thought or urge out of consciousness into the unconsciousness |
| Reaction Formation | replace unacceptable feeling or urge with its opposite |
| Projecton | Believing that impulses coming from within are coming from other people |
| Regression | going back to an earlier and less mature pattern |
| Carl Jung | distinguished between personal and collective unconscious |
| Collective Unconscious | the storehouse of instincts, urges, and memories of the entire human species through history |
| Archetypes | inherited universal ideas that reflect the common experiences of humanity and which are in every person |
| Carl Jung | identified archetypes by studying dreams, visions, paintings, poetry, folk stories, myths, religions |
| Alfred Adler | believed that the driving force in people's lives is a desire to overcome their feelings of inferiority |
| Alfred Adler | believed that everyone struggles with inferiority |
| Inferiority Complex | developed by people who continually try to cover up and avoid feeling of inadequacy |
| Life Styles | Adler's patterns of overcoming inadequacies |
| Alfred Adler | believed that the way parents treat their children has a great influence on the styles of life they choose. |
| Erich Fromm | centerd his theory around the need to belong and the loneliness freedom brings |
| Erich Fromm | believed personality is to a considerable extent a reflection of factors such as social class, minority status, education, vocation, religious and philosophical background. |
| Karen Horney | stressed the importance of the basic anxiety and resentment felt by children |
| Behaviorists | believe that the only proper subject of matter of psychology is objectively observable behavior |
| Behaviorists | more concerned with controlling than understanding behavior |
| Contingencies of Reinforcement | the conditions that maintain behavior |
| Albert Bandura | believed that personlaity is not just acquired through direct reinforcement but also is a result of observational learning |
| Observational Learning | Learning a new behavior by watching another person and the consequences of their behavior |
| Albert Bandura | believed we can direct our own behavior by the type of models we choose |
| Humanistic Psychology | rebelled against the pessimistic view of human nature proposed by Freudians and the mechanistic views of the Behaviorists |
| Humanistic Psychology | stresses our relative freedom from instinctual pressures and our ability to create and live by personal standards |
| Humanistic Psychology | founded on the belief that all human's strive for self-actualization |
| Self-Actualization | the relization of our potentialities as unique human beings |
| Needed for self-actualization | openess to a wide range of experiences; an awareness of and respect for personal unquenesses |
| Self-actualization | involves accepting the responsibilities of freedom and commitment and a desire to become more and more authentic |
| Authentic Persons | are true to themselves and have an ability to grow |
| Abraham Maslow | tried to base his studies on healthy instead of disturbed individuals |
| Self-actualized people | adjust to their problems in ways that allow them to become highly productive |
| Self-actualized people | perceive reality accurately, accept themselves, others, and their environment readily |
| Self-actualized people | accept themselves as they are instead of denying shortcoming or trying to rationalize or change things about themselves that they don't like |
| Self-actualized people | are more problem-centered than self-centered; are more likely to make decisions based on ethical principles than on calculations or personal costs/benefits |
| self-actualizing people | identify with others; have a strong sense of humor; are spontaneous; are autonomous; value privacy; seek solitude; focus on living relationships few a few close people; appreciate simple things |
| self-actualizing people | approach life with a sense of discovery that makes each day new |
| Abraham Maslow | believed that self-actualizing people must satisfy basic needs for food, shelter, safety, love, belonging, self-esteem |
| Carl Rogers | was primarily concerned with the roadblocks and detours on the path to self-actualization |
| Carl Rogers | believed that many personal conflicts arise because what we value in ourselves conflicts with what we learn from others |
| Carl Rogers | believed there are two sides to every person: the organism and the self |
| The Organism | is the whole person including the body |
| The organism | is constantly struggling to become more and more complete |
| The self | is essentially your image of who you are and what you value |
| The self | is acquired gradually ove the years by observing how other people react to you |
| positive regard | approval from significant others |
| conditions of worth | lead us to see ourselves as good or bad and come from the mixed messages of others |
| Ways of coping with condtions of worth | rejecting or denying parts of the organism that do not fit in the self-concept |
| Unconditional Positive Regard | when other convey they feeling that they value you for what you are, in your entirety |
| Fully Functioning Person | A person in which the organism and the self are one; is free to develop all of his potentialities |
| trait theorists | argue that the best way to understand human behavior is to study personality traits |
| trait | a predisposition to respond in a certain way in many different kinds of situations |
| two basic assuptions of trait theory | 1. every trait applies to all people; 2. the descriptions of the traits can be quantified and studied. |
| first and foremost question for trait theorists | "What behaviors go together?" |
| Statistical Analysis | used by trait theorists to determine what behaviors go together |
| Gordon Allport | Trait theorist that emphasized the positive, rational, and conscious reasons why we act |
| Gordon Allport | believed that traits make a wide variety of situations "functionally equivalent." |
| Gordon Allport | held that traits are responsible for the relative consistency of every individual's behavior |
| nomothetic | the study of large groups to identify general laws of personality |
| idiographic | studying individual people in detail |
| Raymond Cattell | identified two types of traits: source and surface traits |
| surface traits | clusters of behavior that tend to go together |
| source traits | the underlying roots or causes of the behavioral clusters |
| Hans Eysenck | identified two basic dimension of personality: 1. the degree to which people have control over their feelings; 2. extrovert vs. introvert |
| Emotionally Stable | easy-going; relaxed; well-adjusted; even-tempered person |
| Neurotic | moody, anxious, restless person |
| Extrovert | sociable, outgoing, active, lively person |
| Introvert | more thoughtful, reserved, passive, unsociable, quiet person |
| Psychoticism | the degree to which people can or cannot deal with real life situations |
| The Big Five | traits that appear repeatedly in different research studies |
| The Big Five | neuroticism; extroversion; openness; agreeableness; conscientiousness |
| Interpersonality Theories of Personality | see personality as a function of a person's social environment |
| Harry Stack Sullivan | Interpersonal theorists that proposed a two-dimensional model of personality |
| Power and Friendliness | the two dimensions of Harry Stack Sullivan's model of personality |
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